YouTube Scraper – Search, Channels, Playlists & Video Details (no API key)

A fast, affordable alternative to the YouTube Data API – no API key, no quotas. Scrape:

• Search results for any keyword – videos, channels or playlists – with sort (relevance, upload date, view count, rating) and upload-date filters, hundreds of results per query.
• Channels – channel profile (subscribers, video count, description, handle, avatar) plus every video of the Videos, Shorts and Live tabs.
• Playlists – all videos of any playlist.
• Video details – exact view count, likes, publish date, full description, tags/keywords, category, duration, channel and its subscriber count.

Clean, consistent JSON for every video: videoId, url, title, channelName, channelId, channelUrl, viewCount, publishedTimeText/publishedAt, durationSeconds, thumbnailUrl, isLive, isShort, position, source – and with details also likeCount, description, keywords, category, channelSubscriberCount.

Pricing: $1 per 1,000 listed videos/channels/playlists, $2 per 1,000 detailed videos. Combine with our YouTube Transcript Scraper and YouTube Comments Scraper.

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": ["python tutorial"], "searchSort": "view_count", "searchUploadDate": "year", "maxResultsPerQuery": 100,
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown"], "channelTabs": ["videos", "shorts"], "maxVideosPerChannel": 0,
  "playlistUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi"],
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"],
  "fetchDetailsForListedVideos": false
}

Example output (search result)

{
  "type": "video", "videoId": "lIId8IDP6TU", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIId8IDP6TU",
  "title": "Lecture 2 : Strings & Conditional Statements | Python Full Course",
  "description": "This lecture was made with a lot of love …",
  "channelName": "Shradha Khapra", "channelId": "UC1XBh-m27kkgwLAwu_SRJBg", "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@shradhaKD", "channelIsVerified": false,
  "publishedTimeText": "2 years ago", "publishedAt": "2024-08-19T14:10:45.184Z",
  "durationText": "55:41", "durationSeconds": 3341,
  "viewCountText": "6,255,142 views", "viewCount": 6255142,
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lIId8IDP6TU/hq720.jpg", "isLive": false,
  "source": "search:python tutorial", "position": 1
}

Channel item:

{ "type": "channel", "channelId": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw", "handle": "@3blue1brown", "title": "3Blue1Brown", "subscriberCount": 8550000, "videoCount": 242, "description": "…", "avatarUrl": "…", "rssUrl": "…" }

Use cases

• Market & competitor research – what content ranks for your keywords, who the top channels are, which formats get views.
• Influencer discovery – channels by topic with subscriber and video counts.
• Content monitoring – schedule runs to catch new uploads of competitors (searchUploadDate: today).
• Datasets for AI – video metadata at scale; add transcripts and comments with our companion actors.
• SEO & trend analysis – titles, views and publish dates across thousands of videos.

Notes

• publishedAt for listed videos is derived from YouTube's relative text ("2 years ago") and therefore approximate; detailed videos have the exact date.
• Channel Shorts provide title and views; use details for more fields.
• The actor runs without proxies and switches to Apify residential proxy automatically if YouTube rate-limits.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per listed item (video/channel/playlist) and $0.002 per detailed video.

Integrations

API, SDKs, schedules, webhooks; export JSON/CSV/Excel; Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n; MCP tool for AI agents.